Quantifying changes in ecosystem goods and services from land-use change in the Amazon basin

David
P
Zaks, University of Wisconsin - Madison, zaks@wisc.edu
(Presenting)

The Amazon basin delivers an array of ecosystem goods and services to recipients at local, regional and global scales. As an increasing amount of land is converted from natural vegetation to cropland, pasture, biofuel and timber production, the social, economics and biophysical changes have yet to be fully quantified. There are inherent trade-offs of these goods and services with changes in land-use that occur across scales. Here, we begin to calculate the impact of land-use changes for commodity production across the Amazon and identify user groups that benefit or lose from such changes. This work leverages the previous LBA research by Foley, Costa, Coe and Patz along with economic and statistical data on commodity production and trade to deliver spatially explicit estimates of the changes in ecosystem goods and services across the Amazon basin.